I’ve had an eye out for a hybrid for a while — Mrs. Zumsteg in particular has an extremely short commute on city streets, and her car is going to need replacement at some point here.

Anyway, I saw this in a Prius ad:

Mileage is around 91k right now, which is considered pretty low for a hybrid.

What does that even mean? Are hybrids supposed to have high miles? And who considers that low? My insurance company figures that ~10k/year is normal. This thing isn’t far out off that pace, but that’s not low.

The really interesting thing to me is that someone composed that sentence thinking it was a selling point or even a mitigation strategy. Now, if it was highway miles, you might go “okay, well, that’s not 91k of stop and go, at least” but the author of this ad thought something like “I’ll disclose the miles… jeez, that seems high now that I’ve written it down. I should say something. Um, ‘At least it’s not 100k?’ No, that just reminds them it’s close. What do I do?”

And eventually settled on this bizarre nonseqiutor. What were the rejected second halves of this sentence?

Mileage is around 91k right now…
– later it’ll be around 81 if I can figure out how to reset this stupid tamper-proof odometer. Heck, 71.
– and 91 was a pretty good year, if you think about it, am I right?
– but that includes the time I went to the store for chips but they were all out and that shouldn’t count
– and I’m going to rack it up even faster after placing this ad
– most of it from driving back and forth to your mom’s house